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  <title>Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser</title>
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        href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf" />
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  	<img src="magpie-photo.jpg">
	<h1>MagpieRSS</h1>
	<p>
	<h2>MagpieRSS provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP.</h2>
	<p>
	MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS .9 through RSS 1.0, and supports the
	RSS 1.0's modules. (with a few exceptions)
	<p>
	<div class="nav">
	<center><h3>Project Info</h3></center>
	<ul>
	<li><a class="nav"
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">Download
Magpie</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav"
href="http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=55691">Mailing
Lists</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="#news">News!</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="#why">Why?</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="#features">Features</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="#philosophy">Philosophy</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="#usage">Usage Examples</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="/cookbook.html">Cookbook</a></li>
	<li><a class="nav" href="#todo">Todo</a></li>
<li style="list-style: none; padding-top: 5px;"><a title="Keep up on MagpieRSS news via RSS" href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf"><img
src="http://magpierss.sf.net/black_grey_magpie_news.gif" border="0"></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
	<a name="news"></a>
	<h3>News!</h3>
	<ul>

<li class="news">
		<a 
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">MagpieRSS
0.51 Released</a>
<ul>
<li> important bugfix!</li>
<li> fix <a href="http://laughingmeme.org/archives/000811.html
">"silent failure"</a> when PHP doesn't have zlib</li>
</ul>

</li>

<li class="news">
		<a href="http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/">Feed On Feeds Uses Magpie</a>
<ul>
<li> server based PHP RSS aggregator built with MagpieRSS</li>
<li> easy to install, easy to use.</li>
</ul>

</li>


<li class="news">
		<a 
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=158897">MagpieRSS
0.5 Released</a>
<ul>
<li> supports transparent HTTP gzip content negotiation for reduced bandwidth usage</li> 
<li> quashed some undefined index notices</li>
</ul>

</li>


<li class="news">
		<a 
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=139643">MagpieRSS
0.46 Released</a>
<ul>
<li> minor release, more error handling clean up</li> 
<li> documentation fixes, simpler example</li>
<li> new <a href="/TROUBLESHOOTING">trouble shooting</a> guide for installation and usage problems</a>
</ul>

</li>

<li class="news">
		<a 
href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf">Magpie News as RSS</a>
<ul>
<li> releases, bug fixes, releated stories as an RSS feed</li> 
</ul>

</li>


<li class="news">
		<a 
href="http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/cookbook.html">MagpieRSS
Cookbook: Simple PHP RSS How Tos</a>
<ul>
<li> answers some of the most frequently asked Magpie questions</li> 
<li> feedback, suggestions, requests, recipes welcome</li>
</ul>

</li>

<li clas="news">
 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=134850">MagpieRSS 0.4 Released!</a>
<ul>
<li> improved error handling, more flexibility for script authors,
backwards compatible</li>
<li> new and better examples!  including using MagpieRSS and <a
href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a></li>
<li> new Smarty plugin for RSS date parsing</li>
</ul>
<br />
</li>
<!--
<li class="news">
<a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">Infinite Penguin now
supports Magpie 0.3</a>
<ul>
<li> simple, sophisticated RSS viewer</li> 
<li> includes auto-generated javascript ticker from RSS feed</li>
</ul>

</li>


<li class="news">
<a
href="http://traumwind.tierpfad.de/blog/magpie/magpie_alike.php">Traumwind
releases REX backend for MagpieRSS</a>
<ul>
<li>drop in support using regex based XML parser</li>
<li>parses improperly formed XML that chokes expat</li>
</ul>

</li>

<li class="news">
		<a
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">
		MagpieRSS 0.3 Released!</a>
		<ul>
		  <li>Support added for 
			 <a href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP
			 Conditional GETs</a>.</li>
		  <li>See <a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">ChangeLog</a>
		  for more info.</li>
	    </ul>
		</li>
		<li class="news">MagpieRSS 0.2!</a>
		<ul>
		  <li>Major clean up of the code.  Easier to use.</li>
		  <li>Simpler install on shared hosts.</li>
	      <li>Better documentation and comments.</li>
		</ul>
		</li>
		<li class="news">We've <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss/">moved to
		Sourceforge!</a></li>
	-->
	</ul>
	</p>
	<p>
	<a name="why"></a>
	<h3>Why?</h3>
	I wrote MagpieRSS out of a frustration with the limitations of existing
	solutions.   In particular many of the existing PHP solutions seemed to:
	<ul>
	<li>use a parser based on regular expressions, making for an inherently
	fragile solution
	<li>only support early versions of RSS
	<li>discard all the interesting information besides item title, description,
	and link.
	<li>not build proper separation between parsing the RSS and displaying it.
	</ul>
	In particular I failed to find any PHP RSS parsers that could sufficiently
	parse RSS 1.0 feeds, to be useful on the RSS based event feeds we generate
	at <a href="http://protest.net">Protest.net</a>.
	</p>
	<p>
	<a name="features"></a>
	<h3>Features</h3>

<ul>
	<li class="toplevel">
	<h4>Easy to Use</h4>
	As simple as:
<pre>
require('rss_fetch.inc');
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
</pre>

	</li>
	<li class="toplevel">
		<h4>Parses RSS 0.9 - RSS 1.0</h4>

		Parses most RSS formats, including support for 
		<a href="http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/">1.0 modules</a> and limited
		namespace support.  RSS is packed into convenient data structures; easy to
		use in PHP, and appropriate for passing to a templating system, like 
		<a href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a>.
	</li>
	<li>
	<h4>Integrated Object Cache</h4>
	
	Caching the parsed RSS means that the 2nd request is fast, and that
including the rss_fetch call in your PHP page won't destroy your performance,
and force you to reply on an external cron job. And it happens transparently.

	</li>
	<li>
	<h4>HTTP Conditional GETs</h4>
	
	Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use of
	Last-Modified and ETag.<br /> See <a
	href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers</a>
	</li>
	
	<li><h4>Configurable</h4>
	
	Makes extensive use of constants to allow overriding default behaviour, and
	installation on shared hosts.
	</li>
	<li><h4>Modular</h4>
	<ul>
		<li>rss_fetch.inc - wraps a simple interface (<code>fetch_rss()</code>)
		around the library.
		<li>rss_parse.inc - provides the RSS parser, and the RSS object
		<li>rss_cache.inc - a simple (no GC) object cache, optimized for RSS objects
		<li>rss_utils.inc - utility functions for working with RSS.  currently
		provides <code>parse_w3cdtf()</code>, for parsing <a
		href="http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime">W3CDTF</a> into epoch seconds.
	</ul>
</ul>

	
	</p>
<p>
	<a name="philosophy"></a>
	<h3>Magpie's approach to parsing RSS</h3>

	Magpie takes a naive, and inclusive approach. Absolutely
	non-validating, as long as the RSS feed is well formed, Magpie will
	cheerfully parse new, and never before seen tags in your RSS feeds.
	</p>
	<p>
	This makes it very simple support the varied versions of RSS simply, but
	forces the consumer of a RSS feed to be cognizant of how it is
	structured.(at least if you want to do something fancy)
	</p>
	<p>
	Magpie parses a RSS feed into a simple object, with 4 fields:
	<code>channel</code>, <code>items</code>, <code>image</code>, and
	<code>textinput</code>.
	</p>	
	<p>
	<h4>channel</h4>
	<code>$rss->channel</code> contains key-value pairs of all tags, without
	nested tags, found between the root tag (&lt;rdf:RDF&gt;, or &lt;rss&gt;) 
	and the end of the document.
	</p>
	<p>
	<h4>items</h4>
	<code>$rss->items</code> is an array of associative arrays, each one
	describing a single item.  An example that looks like:
	<pre>
&lt;item rdf:about="http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&#38;ID=210257"&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Weekly Peace Vigil&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;link&gt;http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&#38;ID=210257&lt;/link&gt;
&lt;description&gt;Wear a white ribbon&lt;/description&gt;
&lt;dc:subject&gt;Peace&lt;/dc:subject&gt;
&lt;ev:startdate&gt;2002-06-01T11:00:00&lt;/ev:startdate&gt;
&lt;ev:location&gt;Northampton, MA&lt;/ev:location&gt;
&lt;ev:enddate&gt;2002-06-01T12:00:00&lt;/ev:enddate&gt;
&lt;ev:type&gt;Protest&lt;/ev:type&gt;
&lt;/item&gt;
	</pre><p>
	Is parsed, and pushed on the <code>$rss-&gt;items</code> array as:
	<p><pre>
array(
	title =&gt; 'Weekly Peace Vigil',
	link =&gt; 'http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&#38;ID=210257',
	description =&gt; 'Wear a white ribbon',
	dc =&gt; array (
			subject =&gt; 'Peace'
		),
	ev =&gt; array (
		startdate =&gt; '2002-06-01T11:00:00',
		enddate =&gt; '2002-06-01T12:00:00',
		type =&gt; 'Protest',
		location =&gt; 'Northampton, MA'
	)
);
</pre>
</p>
<p>
<h4>image and textinput</h4>
<code>$rss->image</code> and <code>$rss-textinput</code> are associative arrays
including name-value pairs for anything found between the respective parent
tags.
</p>
<p>
<a name="usage"></a>
<h3>Usage Examples:</h3>

A very simple example would be:
<pre>
require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';

$url = 'http://magpie.sf.net/samples/imc.1-0.rdf';
$rss = fetch_rss($url);

echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "&lt;br&gt;\n";
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
	$title = $item[title];
	$url   = $item[link];
	echo "&lt;a href=$url&gt;$title&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;br&gt;\n";
}
</pre>
More soon....in the meantime you can check out a 
<a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">cool tool built with
MagpieRSS</a>, version 0.1.
</p>
<p>
<a name="todo"></a>
<h3>Todos</h3>
	<h4>RSS Parser</h4>
	<ul>
		<li>Swap in a smarter parser that includes optional 
		support for validation, and required fields.</li>
		
		<li>Support RSS 2.0 (as much as I'm annoyed by it)</li>
		
		<li>Improve support for modules that rely on attributes</li>
	</ul>
	
	<h4>RSS Cache</h4>
	<ul>
		<li>Light-weight garbage collection
	</ul>
	
	<h4>Fetch RSS</h4>
	<ul>
	<li>Attempt to <a
	href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15.html">auto-detect an
	RSS feed</a>, given a URL following, much like <a
	href="http://diveintomark.org/projects/misc/rssfinder.py.txt">rssfinder.py</a>does.
	</li>
	</ul>
	<h4>Misc</h4>
		<ul>
		<li>More examples</li>
		<li>A test suite</li>
		<li>RSS generation, perhaps with <a
	href="http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/">RSSwriter</a>?
		</li>
		</ul>
	
</p>
<p>
<h3>RSS Resources</h3>
	<ul>
	<li><a href="http://mnot.net/rss/tutorial/">RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers
	and Webmasters</a> is a great place to start.
	<li><a href="http://gils.utah.gov/rss/">RSS Workshop:  Publish and Syndicate
	Your News to the Web</a> is also a good introduction</li>
	<li><a href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/finding_more.html">Finding
	More Channels</a> on how to find RSS feeds.
	<li>Hammersley's <a href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/">Content Syndication
	with XML and RSS</a> is a blog covering RSS current events.
	<li><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/">RSS-DEV mailing
	list</a> is generally a very helpful, informative space, with the occasional
	heated debate	
	<li><a href="http://feeds.archive.org/validator/">RSS Validator</a>
	</ul>.
</p>
<h3>License and Contact Info</h3>
Magpie is distributed under the GPL license...
<p>
coded by: kellan (at) protest.net, feedback is always appreciated.
<p>
<a href="http://sourceforge.net"><img
src="http://sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=55691&amp;type=3" 
width="125" height="37" border="0" alt="SourceForge.net Logo"></a>
<img src="http://laughingmeme.org/magpie_views.gif">
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